What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I’m going to bring you something different.
I promised you an ab exercise, in particular for the lower abs, as you’ve never tried
before.
I’m going to take it a step further than that.
I think what I’m going to show you here today is going to be the best lower ab exercise
you’ve done for a lot of reasons because it’s going to be able to challenge, and
help a lot of different people, no matter what ability level you’re at right now.
We know when we’re training lower abs you want to pick some movement that moves the
pelvis up, toward the shoulders.
Curls from the bottom, up.
We might try lots of different exercises to do this.
Like, hanging ab exercises.
Hanging knee raises.
Hanging leg raises.
But there’s a problem with these exercises.
A couple, actually.
Number one: beginners sometimes find it very challenging to hang out and hold themselves
up on the bar for any meaningful amount of time to be able to get enough reps in to challenge
themselves.
The second thing is, these exercises – if not cued properly – can become over reliant
on the hip flexors to do the movement.
I’ve talked before about the key in showing your ass.
Meaning, show your ass and curl your pelvis up while you do these exercises.
But sometimes, because of weakness in the lower abs, people aren’t able to do that,
and they tend to just use the hip flexors to lift the legs.
We could also do a ton of exercises on the ground to hit the lower abs with the same
concept being ‘pull the legs up’, or ‘move the pelvis backward’.
But again, the same things apply here, too.
In that, you’re actually using your hip flexors far too much, shutting down the lower
ab activation, and defeating the entire purpose.
What we can do is this exercise right here.
This is called a screwdriver.
Guys, you set yourself up into a dip station.
The key to this exercise here is, you really don’t have to worry too much about curling
the pelvis up.
This makes it a lot more tolerable for beginners because all you have to do is learn how to
posteriorly tilt and lift yourself up.
For those who have watched this channel for any length of time, you say “But Jeff, that’s
your gymnast ab exercise.
I have tried it before because I’ve watched you before.”
Well, it’s actually a little different.
All you have to do now is hold yourself in this position – which, by the way, is a
lot easier and a lot more helpful for those who have any kind of shoulder problems because
this compression of the joint provides more stability in the shoulder than that distraction
does when you hang from a bar.
It’s actually a lot easier.
So, what we do for the exercise is, we come down, we screw drive ourselves down to the
ground, and we pull up, and then down, and pull up.
You’ll see, I’m trying to keep my elbows relatively straight, so all the work is being
done by the abs and the obliques.
That’s one of those added benefits here.
It’s why I love it so much.
Any time we can take muscles that prefer to work together and get them to work together,
like the abs and obliques, then we’ve got a winner.
We just do this for time.
The other benefit to this, and why I really like this, is what happens when we have an
overreliance on those hip flexors?
We tend to get tight hip flexors, which will cause low back pain.
So, anyone that gets low back pain from doing ab exercises runs out of options and things
to do to hit your lower abs.
This actually gives us an opposite effect.
We get decompression of the spine because once we let our arms post us up here, and
let our pelvis drop, we have decompression of the spine.
You can literally feel your pelvis drop and open up some nice room in your low back.
So, it should feel pretty good, in terms of that.
It’s like a distraction.
So, from there, again, just up, and down, and that’s it.
Again, I actually have had to move to these kinds of exercises over the years because
of the issue I had with my shoulder.
I’ve found that the added benefits of getting that compression were helping that out, while
at the same time, working together in a way that it hasn’t been working before.
So, give this one a try, guys.
It’s the screwdriver.
I promise you, even the beginners, to do this as long as you can hold yourself up – which
shouldn’t be that much work because you don’t want to sit here with bent elbows
the whole time.
Let your joints hold you up there.
It’s going to work for you, guys.
I promise.
If you’re looking for a program that puts the science back in strength, has lots of
criteria of how we arrive at the exercises that we use in our program – because they
have to work.
They have to be safe.
We have them all put together already for you in our step by step program.
That’s over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you’ve found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you in
the days, and weeks ahead.
See you soon.